Crunchy Purple Kittens
by socioNycto
Summary: There are some days that just aren't worth the letters they're written in, and Dib has been having a two year long run of 'em. The reason? The threat of piggy based doom, the return of a certain teacher, and a truce with Zim...
1. The Three Stigmata of Dib Whatshisname

There are days that are full of sunshine and warm light and candy and happiness, there are days so grey and astoundingly average that one can't recall they've even passed, and then…

There are days that are full of sunshine and warm light and candy and happiness, there are days so grey and astoundingly average that one can't recall they've even passed, and then…

…there are days like this one.

Ones that aren't even worth the letters they are written in, or the breath used to say their name.

I, paranormal expert and belittled champion of Earth, have had two straight years of _those_.

Of course, I think this as proudly as I can while my desk does its very, very best to suffocate me to sleep and the teacher continues shattering our feeble dreams with her cynical hissing of just how doomed we really are.

"Sara!!"

"Yes, Ms. Bitters?"

"What is your greatest hope and aspiration?"

"To bring peace to all the world?"

"Silly and pointless and **DOOMED**!!"

-

My day had started off as it is prone to Monday through Friday and especially Tuesday, with the horridly repetitive shrieking of my Happy Noodle Boy-brand alarm clock. The little stick-figure statue on top screamed at me, told me to wake up and to "throw of the oppressive shackles of hair gel," whatever that meant. I groaned, gathered up enough strength to tug my blanket to the side and rolled over to shut the stupid thing off.

"Dib. Waffles."

I've never quite figured out just how my purple-haired devil of a sister can yell without _actually_ yelling, but somehow her voice manages to shoot its way to my room without regard to how quiet she's being. I didn't reply, knowing it wouldn't matter if I did, and instead focused my energy onto standing up and struggling to the closet for clothes.

A shirt, pants and a trench coat later I was hobbling down the stairs, pushing my glasses up my nose and praying to whatever superior being what happened to be listening that I didn't finish my trip in a heap at the bottom.

My wishes were granted and I made it to ground level without so much as a minor scrape, let alone the few broken ribs that a tumble down the steps would mean. I sauntered dizzily into the kitchen, where a floating hologram of my father's head was keeping my sister company as she plowed through a stack of chocolate-chip waffles.

I just barely choked mine down, my muscles still not working properly enough even to manage something as seemingly simple as eating breakfast.

"Have an educational day at school, son and daughter!" the hologram spouted as soon as we were done; it grew mechanical arms from its base and pushed us out the door with our backpacks being dropped next to us soon after.

"I hate you, Dib."

I sighed. "Yeah, Gaz, I know."

-

The walk to school was as dreadful as always, with my sister and I walking side by side in silence, punctuated by the occasional wave of pure hatred she sent my way. We met up with Zim halfway through. I looked at him, he looked at me, he declared his blind hatred for me and vise versa while Gaz murdered away at her handheld. The three of us then walked to school in a neat row that took up the width of the sidewalk, clearing other pedestrians and the occasional weak-spirited squirrel or puppy to the side like an ice-scraper sloughing off the slush from a windshield. Cockroaches were simply squished.

We proceeded as such up until the school's steps were reached, after which Zim and I watched my sister scuttle off alone to her classroom, still staring fixated at her console's tiny, back-lit screen. He and I glanced at each other, then silently made our way to the class of the demon-teacher, Ms. Bitters.

We took our seats.

Hell.

My day so far has been complete and utter burning, crackling Hell, just like every other day since a truce was finally reached between megalomaniacal green alien and Earth-defending, bespectacled human. Hell hell hell hell HELL. Hell.

Apparently, my teacher's circuits have been blown because she's not even providing an explanation or reason why anymore, she's simply sitting at her clawed desk repeating her beloved catch phrase. Just sitting there and saying "DOOMED" as if she's getting paid thirty-two dollars and six cents each time the word slithers its way past her probably mechanical or at the very least spookily supernatural lips.

I glare at the clock as it mocks me and somehow counts _backwards_ from noon and my beloved lunch break. I stare at it, it stares at me and it starts to cry. Giving up, it finally admits my superiority and lets its hands point to twelve and twelve just as the piercing shriek of a bell resounds off the desks and walls.

"Go on, class," my teacher hisses, "continue your DOOMED lives in the lunchroom."

Of course, none of my fellow classmates have heard her, as they had all flown out the door before the bell had been halfway done with its screaming. I'll take my time, assuming I'm alone in here as always—

"Dib-stink!! Must you take so terribly, terribly long with the simplest of Earth-child tasks?"

I don't need to look, I could recognize that voice even if its owner was suffering from a foreign equivalent of a head cold, stuffing his face full of disgustingly crazy tacos and doing an impersonation of a deep southerner who also happened to be sick and eating all at the same time.

"And just how do you know they're simple, Zim? For all you know, these could be the most complicated errands on the entire planet!"

The alien's eyes change size in their annoying and slightly nauseating way, until one's bigger than the other and he looks like a genetic mutation of confusion and mirth.

"But is this not a simple gathering of the tools in your immediate area?"

I glance down at the papers I am currently sweeping into my arms.

"Yes, well…no," I say, hoping my irrelevant answer will suffice. He continues to give me that strange, I'm-not-really-sure-if-I'm-right-but-you're-definitely-wrong look until I break eye contact with him and run out the door to shove said papers in my locker.

-

Lunch is Hell. I glare at the semi-food with a half-sickened grimace, praying that the greenish, transparent, pudding-like substance in the main dish part of the yellow plastic tray wasn't _really_ moving, and that it was just my imagination making my mashed potatoes writhe at me. I feel like vomiting as I scoot the tray off to the side.

To my right, Gaz is ignoring her food as well, though whether or not the reason is because she is revolted by it escapes me, as she is, after all, squinting at her Game Slave 3. The second had become obsolete about a month ago, the same month that my entire class had greeted with a groan as we returned to school only to find that this year, Ms. Bitters would be teaching eighth grade instead of fourth. It had been four years since we'd seen her, and she hadn't changed one hate-filled, psyche-scarring bit.

Zim sits across from me, spooning dark violet powder from a metal lunchbox labeled as "NORMAL EARTH-STUDENT FOOD" into his mouth. I lean forward and try to see what other Irken food is in there, hoping that something inside would be more edible than what's in front of me but his gloved claws click the lid closed and he gives me as piercing a glare as he can manage and trust me, that's pretty damn piercing.

Now, mind, he's only sitting in the same oxygen radius as I am because he's as rejectable as Gaz and I and one or two other freaks are and there's nowhere else to sit. Oh yeah, and the truce-thingy.

I hate that truce-thingy.

Gaz forced us to sign it after the fourth time one of our battles found its way up to her room, and this time one of her precious broken-glass-stuffed, murderous cyborg plushies had been shattered as a result. I can't say I was too sorry, as those plushies are one of the few things in this world that I will gladly kill another human being to avoid solely because of creepiness. They. Are. Creepy.

Anyway, she wrote up a contract and on threat of horrible, piggy-based doom had us sign our names at the bottom, mine in English, his in Irken. She pulled us to her by our collars, looked us in the eyes and described to us in great detail exactly how her and the piggy, if we broke our word and started fighting again, would extract each of our various organs, human and otherwise, fill the empty cavities with molten pizza and send us to be eaten by tiny, starving housecats in China. I don't think Zim knows where China is but I'm pretty sure he got the gist of it, because he looked as anxiety-stricken as I felt. Everything has been calm since.

No new plans for world domination, no information-gathering, not even any of GIR's Crazy Taco runs have seemed to be cover for an ulterior plot. In short, no rivalry bigger than that of classmates has existed between Zim and I for almost two years now.

HELL.

This tranquility is tearing me apart, and I don't know what to do.


	2. A Snapple Bottle Darkly

Nobody's looking. Well, Gaz is, so practiced in her game she doesn't even need to see the screen to know which buttons to mash-- by this point, I suspect it's mostly muscle memory. It's also extremely creepy. _Zim_ isn't looking, though, and at the moment that's what's important; he's engrossed in, fascinated by, almost, a small blue and orange device that I'll definitely have to get my hands on later and take apart, piece by piece by piece. No time for that now.

With every ounce of my honed, ninja-like stealth, I wind my arm across the table, aiming straight for that alien's stupid lunchbox and whatever edible food it may contain. In my mind's eye, I can see the fanfare, the confetti, the screaming women, the reporters in tacky Christmas neckties worn four months too late coming up to me after it's all over, each vying for the privilege of talking to me, Dib, eater of food.

"Dib!" they'll call, overlapping each other like a dozen parrots, "Just how _did_ you do it?"

It'll be beautiful, trumpets will be playing and there will be parties in the street and _oh god those biscuits are looking at me_

Two years ago today, my life had been flying saucers, horrible twitching and the kind of constant, droning whine in the base of your brain that can't possibly be a good thing but you can't really think of anything to do about it because of all the noise. You know, normal. And _as_ normal, all my troubles were radiating out from a single spindly B.E.M., a little green man with technology I'd never even dreamed of and not a single nanoliter of competence in his sick alien body. I'd hated him from the second I saw him. I'd still hate him today if my…she's still staring at me…if Gaz hadn't forced that truce on us after we broke her rabbit cyborg. Every day, that droning whine gets more a little harder to bear. _Every single day._

There's a gross sort of thud as a lunchbox lid gets slammed overzealously on top of my right hand and I retract it like a long strip of elastic snapping back in place. Nursing my injured appendage, I can only watch as Zim sucks in a great deal of nitrogen, obviously preparing to give a trademark long shrieky speech. I sense an ominous, almost evil aura…

"Horrible..piggy-based…doom." And my sister speaks. The tension, which before had been so thick you couldn't have cut it (not even with a knife), is suddenly dispelled from the atmosphere like a demon from some ill-begotten little girl's stomach and Zim, motivated entirely by self-preservation, I'm sure, begrudgingly produces a small plastic sphere full of bluish powder. He throws it at my head.

"Here, if you must take, take _this_," he says, his nasty, self-sure voice turning up in disgust at the end of the sentence like it always does and man, I really want to hit this guy. Without warning, indeed without even seeming to move, he's on the table, disquieted lunchtrays swirling around him like somebody had shaken up a great big Zim-globe. Gaz, of course has earplugs at the ready. I'm not so lucky, and apathetically concede defeat as the lunchtrays' upended contents start to eat into the floor. Hell.

"Take it, human, for the snack your sweaty Earth grabby-hands hold in their confines is the single most disgusting piece of filth ever produced by the great inner sanctum of Foodcourtia's hideous new product testing! Even the almighty Tallest, praised be their name, would retch upon the very sight of this horrific onslaught of fright and terror! Only a fool, a sick and twisted _fool_ would be foolish enough to dare to attempt to eat it and live! Its smell alone is enough to send every last creature on the imaginary Planet of Mop into deadly fits of howling cleaning rampages, scrubbing left and right until the whole universe is sparkling and devoid, DEVOID I SAY of any and all traditional cleaning supplies! In the blink of an eye, a plague of dirty countertops the likes of which _has never before been seen_ will overtake us, and NONE SHALL LIVE.

"LISTEN TO ZIM, for only I know what that horrible container contains! It is a putrid tale of strife and woe, a tragedy rife with terror and FURIOUS PROJECTILE VOMITING.

"If only you knew, Earth-boy," he finishes, shaking his head sadly, "if only you knew."

Something explodes on Gaz's Game Slave screen, but otherwise the cafeteria is silent as Zim clambers back down into his seat and coughs his excuse. "Ahem. I am normal."

There's another moment or two of stunned silence before a collective shrug sweeps across the cafeteria and the children, in unison, return to whatever it was they where doing. Gaz leaves in her earplugs.

-

In the old days, before the truce, there'd been an empty glass bottle of Kiwi-Strawberry Snapple.

I'd deemed it my Official Paranormal Water Bottle of Spookiness, and during the oft-happening 43-hour stretches of monitoring the cameras I'd (secretly) planted in various spots of Zim's lab, it would often be my only source of sustenance. Flipping the red and black switch on my right would bring to life a machine specifically designed to redirect tap water from the kitchen sink, run it through several filters and vitamin infusers, mix it with a flavor jet to make sure it was still drinkable, add some blue food dye for kicks, and pour it out a nozzle spouting from the drywall next to me directly into that all-important empty Snapple bottle. I'd been rather proud of the whole apparatus. Not as proud, of course, as of the modifications I'd made to stolen alien software, a key bit of that letting me monitor Zim's house at all. Everyday after school, after the too-easy homework and the student's glassy-eyed stares and the soul-crushing lectures, I'd sit down with my superwater and watch my favorite show that didn't contain the words _mysterious_ or _mysteries._

Since then, of course, I've tossed the Snapple bottle and dismantled my water machine. What use are they? Not even my hacked-up, half human/half Irken computer gets much mileage these days. The monitoring software is full of glitches and bugs from a two-year span of updateless desert, the compiled Irken dictionary gets the occasional glance but there's no more burning need to learn the stupid language. I've taken up writing. It's not at all the same.

-

An entire week later and the story never changes, never varies even once. We're actors, the both of us, actors on a burning stage performing the same scene over and over again for the sick amusement of a single scary fan. I don't know why _he's_ playing along, saying his lines and poking me when necessary, but I try not to think about it as I'm dropped rather carelessly at my own front door; another morning, another day of curtainless hell. They just refuse to fall.

"I hate you, Dib."

I sigh. I've rehearsed this. "I know."

We walk, Zim joins, cockroaches die, Gaz leaves us and we trudge off to class. Zim and I are silent as we take our seats, but my mind is buzzing, more so than always. Something seems hideously insignificantly off, as if Ms. Bitters hired a service crew yesterday afternoon to come in and paint every surface exactly one shade greener. This can't be possible, and yet the pure _difference _is making my insides squish as I hold my trapper to my chest to keep them all in. This can't be possible, my event-starved mind is playing tricks on me, dangling some kind of odd mirage just to pull it away at the last moment. It's not a healthy thing, I want to think, but then again, neither is this constant drone.

"Good morning, little burdens to the state. Today I have some horrible news."

Oh _fuck_ no.


	3. The Cosmic Puppets

Now, technically, I'm a genius-- Gaz says idiot-savant, but that's neither here nor there. The point is, I'm patient. Things come to me automatically in patterns, in logical positions, etcetera, etcetera, I can solve for x from a kilometer away with my glasses hanging from a maple, etcetera. I'm intelligent. But I've never really 'gotten' music. Don't get me wrong, I've heard it and, if encouraged, I can play it; I'm not a _brilliant_ keyboardist, but if there's ever a sudden desperate need for a tapped-out accompaniment to Auld Lang Syne, I'm your man. It just doesn't mean anything to me.

You hear people talk about music controlling their life or running through their minds constantly and everybody's first questions are "What's your name? What year are you in? What's your favorite band?" and eventually it starts to get to you. You feel like there's some piece of you missing you never knew was supposed to be there, some fundamental flaw in your DNA like trisomy or deletion, only not quite as fatal. Or maybe just as. I wouldn't know.

Zim doesn't understand music, either.

-

"Good morning, little burdens to the state. Today I have some horrible news."

The class is thrust into a black kind of silence, confused and disheartened and suffocating all at once but not a single student interrupts as Ms. Bitters talks on, reading from a sickly-looking memo on her desk.

"With the newly elected governor came a surge in scholastic funding, but instead of buying new textbooks or desks, the school board has decided to spend the money on a—" and now her voice turns snarling and nasty—"on a _funducational_ three-day field trip to Presidentland.

"Unfortunately, due to limited funding, only twenty children from our school will go. If you're not failing this despicably easy year, you're automatically entered in a drawing to determine which of you—" she stops and stares down at the memo in distaste.

"Which of you—" A horrible pause.

"Whichofyouwillbe_funducated_inthenameoftheschoolboard," she says quickly, but not quickly enough. As soon as the words rip out her mouth, trumpets blare a victory song. Grimy-looking confetti is shot over our heads and starts singeing hair; I hastily move my trapper from protecting my liver to protecting my brain. A disco ball drops from the ceiling and flashy blacklights start to go. Two raver cheerleaders with pompoms and neon skirts suddenly start existing and dancing. I have a very strong feeling that I should get the hell out of here.

Zim eyes me strangely on my way to the door, but makes no attempt to join me. I hadn't really been expecting him to, he had seemed too much into our teacher's torment when I was thinking out my plan even to consider it. ('Thinking out my plan' might not be the best phrase there. My head had gotten as far as DOOR before I started following through.) The doorknob, normally a repulsive shade of brown, now looks like a sixties-era pair of acid-wash jeans and, I note with particular disgust, feels like one, too; somehow, somewhere, the Beatles' Revolution starts to play and I turn the knob quickly before the crazy can spread to me. I run out the door and down the hall and out, out, and out.

-

Boy-thing left, yes he did. Wasn't very subtle about it, either. Looked like one of those great blue Bugbladder beasts with their arms and their aerosol cans and the spindly little eyestalks on the top of their heads that make the buzzy noises and lift them off into the air when they whirl them around so exceedingly fast but they fall over when they walk because their feet are so tiny and their heads are so large. Lumbering. Yes, he lumbered to the door like one of those great blue Bugbladder beasts from that galaxy north of here, the fractal one with lots of little planets with tiny Bugbladder beasts for the ones from bigger planets to squish. _My planet's bigger than his is!!_

"HAH! I will squish—" Oh he left. I've got to tell him that I'll squish him like one of those great blue Bugbladder beasts squishing a tiny and perhaps not-quite-as-blue Bugbladder beast from an infinitely smaller planet in their insane Mandelbrot universe full of twists and turns and vaguely amusing aerosol chatter! Where'd he go? Out the door, out the door, out the door with a little window on it, that's where he went. I'm a genius, he should admit that. He'll admit it after I squish his insipid face, I'm sure. I will break his eyeshields, too, and then _who_ will be the superior one? _Who_ will come out victorious as always? More victorious than him, that's for sure, and those hideous Bugbladder beasts as well! I would love to stay and see the Bitters woman's downfall, but first I must tell Dib I will squish him

I use the colorful dancing girls' heads to strategically pounce my way across the room like a rocket ship winning a tiny game of space checkers. What a wonderful simile. My marvelously intelligent plan has me out the door in seconds, of course, to the tune of deafening brass thingies and with not a single human boy or girl being any the wiser.

He's lying on the front lawn trying vaguely to grab pieces of sky with his little fists. Earthens as a whole seem to partake in the most unusual of leisure time activities, but this one especially seems uselessly abnormal. What could possibly be the point of this? I'm standing on his chest to tell him how incompetent he is before I get cold, very very cold. In the window to my right, the Gaz creature's horrible visage is lurking, waiting, _watching_; her squishy eyes glowing in blue light from her video game. She can see me, I'm sure, and has already predicted the horrible ways I am going to stamp this boy's head in and break his face windows; I've got to prove her wrong.

The Dib-thing, of course, is oblivious to our near-future doom, and is still waving his arms about like a crazed mustachioed _thing_—I snatch one of them and shake him warmly by the grabby.

"You see? You see?! La la la la la!! LA LA!! Hear how carefree I am! Hear my whistle float along the breeze! LA LA LA LA LA LALAOOF."

There is a horrible blunt force to my completely human organs, not catching me off guard, of course, as I allowed it to happen, but it still stops me from completing my self-preservation ritual and preventing the full of Gaz's piggy-laden wrath to screech down upon me. Dib grins lazily up at me. This cannot be good.

"Dib!" I leap to my feet. "Just what do you think you're doing? Are you trying to kill us both? Are you trying to squish us like a great blue Bugbladder beast smashing a smaller fractalNO!! I WAS SAVING UP THAT SIMILE FOR SOMETHING AMAZING!! You would have seen, you would have seen, you would have WITNESSED—"

Something small, spinning, and plastic hits me on the back of my head and knocks me down once more. There is some kind of theme here. Aha, but I jump up just in time to see Gaz's boomerang game system fly right back to here hands and once again I am the victor.

"You..two…" Her voice reaches us as if she weren't a few dozen yards away and a jet of some kind wasn't flying overhead. It is my every intention to steal that technology from her and use it to my advantage. She clenches her fist and I immediately sit back down.

Dib's arms are now crossed behind his head, his foot tapping to a melody I'm sure he can't actually hear.

"Zim," he says slowly, "are you an idiot?"


End file.
